'Manhunt: Unabomber' sneak peek: The raid begins

Tonight’s penultimate episode of Discovery’s Manhunt: Unabomber is a true nail-biter, as FBI profiler Jim Fitzgerald (Sam Worthington) is under the gun to amass the evidence needed to secure a search warrant for Ted Kaczynski’s cabin. Why the extreme sense of urgency? Because the plan was originally for a small surveillance team on the ground in Montana to build a case for a warrant over months, but after CBS News learns that the Unabomber has been identified, the FBI has just 24 hours until the network reports it. Now it’s up to Fitz to find a linguistic “smoking gun” that will tie Kaczynski (Paul Bettany) to the Manifesto in the eyes of a Federal judge.

Director/showrunner Greg Yaitanes says producers talked to all the real players involved in the arrest. “I remember Fitz telling me how they went from a six-month timeline to a 24-hour timeline, and about that pressure cooker of trying to get the warrant as they were driving up, basically, to walk up and arrest Ted, and how they were all listening and wondering how it was all going to unfold. We consolidated some of the physical geography, just for streamlining and efficiency of storytelling, but the actual moves and events of that episode are unbelievably accurate,” he says. “I think it’s our most propulsive episode, and the one that required the least amount of compression to tell it because it all happened in real time, and it was really exciting to represent that.”